[ishoottrap]

BRILLIANT!

riptyde, I was about to tear my hair out until I read this post. It never dawned on me that the greyed out selections on the copy menu were meaningful until you pointed out the exiting partition and partition name. Then it made perfect sense! I followed your lead and I too am posting from a machine (Compaq laptop in my case) with the newly installed 60GB 10k rpm drive. I had a flaky 40Gb that would quit responding intermittently and I knew I had to get rid or it eventually it would leave this world all together.

Here's the Symantec tec support response to my question regarding the failure to boot past the mostly blue XP screen after a copy. (Note the complete lack of detail regarding the partition issue, thank you for sharing!)

Thank you for contacting Symantec Online Technical Support.

I understand the difficulties that you are currently facing.

I gather from your message that you are unable to boot from the destination hard drive after copy.

Please be aware that this issue can happen due to errors while copying, it can be either on the sourrce or the destinastion folder. So I recommend that you please run Windows Defragmenter and Microsoft CHKDSK for both source and the destination before copying the image file.

To run Windows Defragmenter:

a. Click Start menu, go to Programs
b. Go to Accessories and System Tools.
c. Click on Disk Defragmenter.

To run Microsoft CHKDSK, please refer the document below:

Title: 'How to run Microsoft CHKDSK from the command line'
Document ID: 2004066687571562
> Web URL: http://service1.symantec.com/support...04066687571562

Note: The above article is a generic document.

Please be aware that you can copy your operating system, applications, and data to a new hard drive. If the hard drive you are copying contains more than one partition, you must copy the partitions one at a time to the new hard drive.

You can use the Copy Drives feature when you upgrade to a larger hard drive or when you add a second hard drive and keep the original. You should not use the Copy Drives feature to set up a hard drive that will be used in another computer.

For more information, please refer to the document provided below:

Title: 'How to copy disk-to-disk using Norton Ghost 9.0'
Document ID: 2004111701520562
> Web URL: http://service1.symantec.com/support...04111701520562

Please be aware that this issue can occur when the system partition's drive letter changes. When migrating an OS, this usually occurs when the destination of the copy had a drive letter already assigned, or if the machine was rebooted with both the source and destination drives still in the machine. To resolve the error, it is usually necessary to run the copy operation again.

To prevent the error from reoccurring:

- It is preferable to have the target location formatted as unallocated space with no partition present, as Drive Copy will copy the partition information from the source drive. Although it is possible to copy into an already existing partition, this can cause boot issues if the destination already has a drive letter assigned, as the letter assignment will carry over when the drive is switched.

- Disable Windows System restore. The document below would provide you with more information in this regard:

Title: 'Disabling or enabling Windows XP System Restore'
Document ID: 2001111912274039
> Web URL: http://service1.symantec.com/support...01111912274039

- A copy of a system partition should also occupy the same relative location on the destination drive that it does on the source. If the system partition is the second partition on the source drive, it should be copied as the second partition on the destination drive as well.

- After the copy is complete, shut the machine down.

CAUTION: Do not reboot the machine yet. Booting from the hard drives at this time can damage program installations and trigger configuration changes that you might not be able to reverse without restoring backups.

- Remove the source drive from the machine, and physically adjust the destination drive so that it is now the first physical drive on the computer. This might require switching jumpers or attaching the destination drive at a different location. If the computer's BIOS is not set to "auto" for drive detection, or you are moving a drive to a different channel, you might also need to update the computer's BIOS. Once you have done this, restart the machine with only the destination drive in the machine.

- If you wish to keep the source drive for use as a backup drive or slave drive, the operating system partition on the source drive will need to be deleted or hidden before you boot into windows with both drives in place. This can be accomplished by connecting the source drive as the primary slave, and then running a partition formatting utility on the source drive before rebooting into Windows.

Please be aware that Norton Ghost 9.0 is compatible with Windows XP Service Pack 2. However, you need to modify the Data Execution Prevention (DEP) policy to allow Norton Ghost 9.0 to launch its services during startup. Please refer to the document linked below for more information on resolving this issue:

Title: 'Norton Ghost 9.0 compatibility with Windows XP Service Pack 2'
Document ID: 2004101410380862
> Web URL: http://service1.symantec.com/Support...04101410380862

Originally Posted by riptyde

Hi all.

I think I figured it out.

I've been reading several forums on issues with norton ghost 9.0 and problems with copying one hdd to another hdd, and one forum was this one. I did manage to make a successfull copy with a successfull boot. (in fact I did this five minutes ago and I am currently running off the "destination" disk).

Any way I wanted to let you guys know what I did in case it can help you in your efforts.

...

I hope this helps you guys.

DID IT EVER!